Society
Modern Political Parties are Cartels
This is excellent from journalist and self-styled ‘Moet Marxist’, Grace Blakeley: Have to say that I much agree. The Labour Party is, I fear, since Corbyn, certainly not democratic and when you look at the people that Labour are ‘consulting’ on their policies, it really does look as though they are asking the people with... Read more
‘I Called out “Free Speech Champion” Laurence Fox as a “Racist” – and He Tried (and Failed) to Bully Me into Silence’
Until 4 March this year, describing Laurence Fox as “racist” risked the ‘free speech champion’ making legal threats with the prospect of financial ruin attached – as quite a number of people can testify.
Prior to that date, the actor-turned-TV presenter and politician faced regular accusations of racism from social media critics, and would often respond by promising expensive court action.
But due in part to Mukhtar Yassin, a young Black British man who – in a David versus Goliath battle – defied Mr Fox’s legal and financial threats, and a racist social media hate campaign from some of Fox’s 500,000 X/Twitter followers, doing so is now a lot less risky.
“I told Laurence Fox he was ‘a racist piece of shit’ on social media, and stand by every word,” says Mr Yassin in an hour-long call with Byline Times, his first and only interview since Fox abandoned his threats and made a “significant” contribution to Yassin’s legal costs last month.
“Fox’s threat of libel action against me was ridiculous and never stood a chance of succeeding. He tried to flex his muscles and bully me, and it didn’t work. If I continue to call out Laurence Fox as racist, he can try to sue me again if he wants, but he won’t because he knows he’ll lose.
“And he didn’t lose to just anybody, he lost – badly, and very publicly – to a young Black boy. I think that will have hurt and embarrassed him. Now he even gets heckled about it in the streets.”
Reclaim Party candidate Laurence Fox. Photo: PA/Alamy
Yassin is, by his own admission, “just a normal working-class bloke from The Ends”. The 29-year-old Muslim lives on a council estate in the Black Country, works in IT and has no legal background, let alone the sort of money required to defend himself against expensive litigation from a high-profile figure on the British right, whose political party Reclaim is backed by the multi-millionaire businessman Jeremy Hosking.
And yet that is exactly where Yassin found himself on 2 May last year when he called out a racially-charged post made the previous day by the then GB News presenter.
“It all started when Fox quote tweeted someone to say: ‘Dear Black people. Stop making everything about you’. I ‘quote tagged’ him saying I thought he was a ‘racist piece of shit’,” says Yassin.
“He told me to delete it and apologise. I replied saying ‘suck your mum’. I know it was childish, and that Fox might try to sue me if he was able to find my address, but it was funny, and I don’t regret it.”
At the time, Fox was going through separate libel proceedings against Crystal, a drag artist, Simon Blake, a former Stonewall trustee, and Nicola Thorp, an actor, all of whom had also called Fox a racist on X [then Twitter], in October 2020. The three had themselves taken legal steps against Fox for calling them “paedophiles”, and he countersued.
With Fox having threatened legal action, Yassin says he seemed in private to be “increasingly desperate” not to sue but “did not want to lose face” in public. Yassin last week posted on X screenshots of Fox on one occasion offering him the opportunity to “discuss” the matter before Fox pursued legal action.
“One of Fox’s GB News colleagues contacted me privately to tell me Fox wanted me to go on his show so he could get me to say something that would support his case. His bosses apparently saw it was a terrible idea and overruled it, not that I’d have gone on anyway.”
Four months after Yassin’s posts, Fox’s legal team managed to track down the address of one of Yassin’s family and served legal papers there. “None of my family knew about the legal threat as they are not on X. They asked me, ‘Who the fuck is Laurence Fox and why is he suing you?’ When I explained that he was sort of famous on X, my mum told me if I believed my words then I should stand by them. So I did.”
That’s not to say Yassin took it lightly. “I’m not going to lie, I was shocked and nervous. It’s a weird feeling. It was a lot to process. So many emotions go through your head when you get a letter like that. I have no legal knowledge; I didn’t even know any solicitors.
“But the day I got the letter I spoke to a few high-profile people, including [the MP] Dawn Butler, who put me in touch with the lawyer who was representing Nicola Thorp, Simon Blake, and Crystal. Once I heard how confident the lawyer was, and I had digested the letter, I felt better. I knew I was right, and Fox didn’t have a leg to stand on.”
Fox posting yet more examples of his apparent ‘racism’ also added to Yassin’s self-belief. “He tweeted one photograph of himself in ‘Black face’ and in another tweet, he told a Black person to ‘fuck off back to Jamaica’; The more he kept tweeting stuff like this the more I knew I would win. The rest is history.”
Yassin was further heartened by the many hundreds of tweets and messages from people supporting his cause – as his follower numbers doubled, and then trebled – many of whom donated to a £35,000 crowdfund for his legal fees. “I was overwhelmed; I didn’t realise how divisive people found Fox to be,” he says.
The positive messages drowned out the negative ones, many of which Yassin says were overtly racist. “For almost two weeks I had loads of far-right accounts calling me [the ‘N-word’] and that I should ‘go home’, that Fox would ‘destroy’ me, or I would get beaten up if they saw me in public. It was relentless.
“X under Elon Musk is horrible. It’s like it has opened the floodgates to every racist around the world. I could tweet ‘Good Afternoon’ and within half an hour I would have people saying ‘what are you doing in my country?’ The stuff I see on there now is insane. It goes to dark places I’ve never seen, with misogynists, Islamophobes, conspiracy theorists. This didn't happen before Musk took over.
“Before then, if someone called me [the ‘N-word’] I would report it and within a few days, the post would be removed. Now when you complain you get a notification saying the rules have not been broken, but they make the post invisible. It’s a con trick. It gives racists confidence to say what they like. And it means there’s no point complaining.”
The rise of GB News, and its often barely-disguised racism, are simply two sides of the same coin, says Yassin. “GB News is toxic. They are just there to brainwash and radicalise people, and Ofcom don’t do anything about it. As a regulator, it makes me wonder whether it’s fit for purpose. GB News and X/Twitter both validate one another. It is an echo chamber of prejudice which unfortunately makes a lot of noise.”
With GB News under pressure to change its culture, Fox was sacked last September following a misogyny scandal which also led to the departure of the channel’s star £600,000-a-year host Dan Wootton in March.
“I was delighted,” says Yassin. “I felt that Fox losing some of his income and profile would have hurt him. But he’s responsible for his own downfall.”
After Fox lost his other libel action in late January – with the judge finding that the three tweets cited in his counterclaim were unlikely to cause serious harm to his reputation – his lawyers offered to drop his case against Yassin -!if Yassin paid his own legal fees and signed a gagging clause. “I said ‘fuck that, no way’.”
Fox then said he would drop the case with a “contribution” towards Yassin’s legal fees without a confidentiality clause in place, to which Yassin agreed because he “wanted it over and done with.”
Yassin says he doesn’t think Fox believes himself to be racist, “even though so much of what he’s saying has racist overtones”.
“One of the phrases he uses is he ‘has Black friends’ – he has a mixed-race girlfriend – and that makes him think he can’t possibly be racist and can say what he wants. It’s odd.”
Yassin also questions why Jeremy Hosking, a former Conservative Party donor - ranked number 351 in the Sunday Times Rich List 2019, with a net worth of £375 million - and a shareholder in Crystal Palace Football Club, is “funding hate” via The Reclaim Party. Fox, its leader, accrued legal fees for the two combined cases believed to be more than £2 million.
“I find it weird that someone would back a person like Fox. Fox is vile and anyone who backs him is going to appear to agree with him. It feels like Hosking and his ilk are using Fox and those like him to fund hate, sow division and wage a culture war.
“I can’t understand why people would want to do this. How would it benefit them? Or benefit society?”
Byline Times has been told that Hosking has ceased to fund Fox since his latest legal defeat, but when approached on this matter, Hosking declined to comment. In reply to several questions from Byline Times, Laurence Fox replied: “Thanks… I only speak with real journalists.”
Yassin, a devoted “family man”, is more interested in the thoughts of those close to him. “When I got off the phone to my lawyer who told me Fox had dropped the case last month, I told my mum and she said, ‘I’m proud of you, son’. Hearing her say that meant everything.”
Brexit shows that all countries are better off within the European Union – who knew?
This FT half hour film itemises and demonstrates what a disaster Brexit is. Not only for trade and industry but also for simple collaborative relations. And even, at the end of the piece, as Martin Wolf suggests, for democracy… Rather similarly, Geert Wilders has publicly abandoned the policy of the Netherlands leaving the EU saying.... Read more
We do not need Fiscal Rules to rool ok?
I agree with Wayne Godley – almost 19 years ago. And in 2024 so does NEF about the European ones: When we know that money is a man made commodity that governments create in order to get stuff done, it is desperately sad that we have allowed finance and their bankers – both commercial and... Read more
Stephanie Kelton on the economy
This YouTube video by the Belgian economist, Joeri Schasfoort, which was conducted in February 2024 at the Warwick Economic Summit held at Warwick University, is really excellent. It forms part of of a series of discussions labelled Money & Macro Talks. He correctly calls the episode with Stephanie Kelton an in-depth discussion. The interview technique... Read more
Share buybacks
Or what in the US is called ‘stock’ buybacks are, as Professor Robert Reich suggests below in this clip of just over two minutes, intimately involved in why Chief Executives are paid so much, and workers, so little: Indeed the evidence would seem to be that buybacks started first in the UK and the idea... Read more
‘Media Attacks on NHS Translation and Diversity Spending Completely Miss the Point of the Health Service’
This week, the Express published an article headlined 'taxpayers billed £100 million for NHS translators – could pay for 3,000 nurses'. The story completely missed the point of what the health service does.
The standfirst went on to explain that taxpayers "pick up the bill" for translation and interpretation" to ensure that the NHS can be "accessed in languages other than English”.
Given health and healthcare access inequalities, surely spending money to ensure people get the right care they need is a good thing – not to mention a legal requirement.
The Express article published on 2 April about NHS spending on translators
The Express packaged the story to suggest that it had uncovered a scandal. It included data revealed through Freedom of Information Requests (FOI) to 251 NHS trusts and 42 integrated care boards, which “routinely convert standard hospital and health literature into languages including Romanian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi”.
The article included comments from a Reform Party spokesman, claiming that translation and interpretation services "were simply not necessary" and that artificial intelligence apps, such as Google Translate, could do the job – or that patients could use family members to translate for them.
The Express article followed the Mail’s report last week on National Trust cafés selling “woke scones” (made with margarine and not butter). It was another example of 'stories’ aimed at stirring up problems, rather than solving them.
The Mail article published on 31 March on 'woke scones'
Helping those in need be heard appears to be a bizarre issue to weaponise in manufactured 'culture wars’.
For starters, the total NHS spend in England for the last financial year was more than £180 billion, with a further £20 billion in local government spending on social care. So £100 million on translation might sound like a big number, but it is a tiny fraction of expenditure and would make little dent in nurse staffing across all NHS organisations.
Citizens or legal residents who don’t speak fluent or even basic English are, just like people with hearing loss, learning disabilities or cognitive impairment, as entitled to NHS care as the rest of the population. And there is already considerable evidence that they are not getting it, with health and healthcare access inequalities between different ethnic communities.
Denying people written information in their own language will only make matters worse.
When people who are sick, scared, vulnerable, distressed or have symptoms to discuss, treatments to understand, or complex psychosocial factors to explain, how can the quality and safety of the care they receive be improved if they can neither express nor understand key information?
There are also legal considerations. To provide valid consent to treatment in common law, patients must have sufficient information about the details, risks, potential harms and benefits of a proposed treatment (which could in some cases involve major surgery, powerful drugs or admission to intensive care). Language barriers must be overcome to make this a reality.
The Mental Capacity Act states that all reasonable efforts must be made to establish decision-specific capacity for treatment or care – which may include overcoming language barriers.
If patients lack capacity, then speaking to those closest to them is a key part of establishing their best interests for further decision-making. Again, this may require translators or clear written information in their first language. We do this for people with hearing loss via written communication or sign language.
Regulatory codes of practice for healthcare professionals are also clear that we must treat people equally, irrespective of characteristics including race, religion or nationality.
Using AI translation apps of variable reliability has its limits in a time-critical or emotionally-charged and challenging situation. And relying on family or friends to translate isn't always possible as not every patient is accompanied. If they are discussing personally sensitive or intimate information, they may be inhibited from doing so. If there are safeguarding concerns regarding abuse or neglect one could suspect the person translating of being coercive when doing so.
The thinly-veiled xenophobia and racism being whipped up by the Express (even against people who pay tax and National Insurance contributions and have precisely the same entitlement to care as native and confident English speakers) is part of a wider set of 'wedge issues’ being pushed by right-wing media outlets and sections of the Conservative and Reform parties.
They share a similar fixation with 'woke’ diversity managers or diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies in the NHS or other public services. Several Government ministers have lined up to call for a 'war on waste’ to remove such posts and policies.
Steve Barclay, when Health Secretary in 2023, wrote to integrated care boards in England instructing them to stop recruiting staff as dedicated EDI managers, arguing that the money should be spent on “frontline staff” instead.
The Express has published a number of articles lamenting 'wokery’ in the NHS – including, in January in a story headlined 'NHS spends £40 million on woke non-jobs that could pay for 1,150 nurses'.
Last year, the Spectator ran a FOI-based story showing that, out of an NHS workforce of around 1.5 million people, there were only 800 employees in dedicated EDI roles – yet called for those roles to be abolished.
Again, those employed in such posts account for a small fraction of 1% of the entire NHS workforce or spend. Their presence is de facto required due to the Equality Act and Equality Duty on public organisations and protections in employment law.
NHS organisations do have a very diverse workforce, yet there is clear evidence of ongoing and endemic discrimination towards minorities within it. There is also consistent evidence of discrimination and care inequalities between different ethnic and socio-economic groups the NHS serves.
The idea that a focus on EDI is somehow a bad thing and a distraction from real work, or that organisations should not employ a small number of people to oversee it, is not so much a dog-whistle as a wolf-klaxon. It is a classic distraction from the real issue – the 14 years of Conservative-led mismanagement of health and social care and of wider public health.
This decline has been well-documented by the Institute for Government think tank; as well former King’s Fund chief executive Professor Sir Chris Ham, who set out in expert detail the rise and decline of the service from the late 1990s through to the 2010 election and the current crisis in performance and public satisfaction.
Blaming our NHS crisis on the cost of translation and interpretation services, and diversity and inclusion managers, foments hostility against people from ethnic minorities, white people with poor English skills, and even those with full entitlement to use our public services and who contribute towards their costs.
They aren’t all rich enough to pay for their own personal translator or digitally equipped enough to auto-translate NHS information documents into their own languages.
I don’t see commentators on the right arguing against hospitals in France or Spain finding translations for ill white British expats or embassies around the world employing translators to help British citizens who have found themselves in a spot of bother with the local law. I wonder why.
The Neoliberal West is doomed – by its bankers
This is a good thread from Stephanie Kelton of Modern Money fame where she indicates how China understands money and uses it appropriately on the state’s behalf. Drawing on an old Bloomberg article, she says: “[O]ld-fashioned financial thinking [says] that the government should aim to balance its budget, but in reality China is already transitioning... Read more
Mr Cummings is, in this instance, correct
He is quoted in this interesting article in the New Yorker, which outlines the long-term effects of austerity which are still, as we know, playing out. The article continues: By contrast, Cummings sees the two cautious, hedging leaders in charge of Britain’s main political parties—and the relief among some centrists that the candidates are not... Read more
The ‘cost’ of chaos…
…is certainly not financial… This Labour created campaigning website is deeply unimpressive. Using it would make campaigning for Labour more difficult. Labour are following the Thatcher lie that government has no money – it’s all taxpayers money.Well if it’s taxpayers’ money why on earth has the government got it? The 2008 financial crisis and Covid... Read more